Re: How do you manage debian mails on your mailbox?
On Sun, Aug 28, 2022 at 11:07:07AM +0530, Nilesh Patra wrote: > I have used my primary email address with folder hooks to sort out mails > according to mailing lists/subjects, using folder hooks and read those folders > every once in a while (depending on how involved I am with each ML/team) That's what I do (a single address, procmail rules to put every ML into its own folder and also sort certain emails into several other folders). > - - Do you have any sensible way to cope up with so many mails from > different mailing lists and not potentially miss out on something important? I skim through all subjects in ML folders, so if that's enough to know which emails are important I shouldn't skip them. And non-ML stuff is stored separately. -- WBR, wRAR signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: How do you manage debian mails on your mailbox?
On Sun, 2022-08-28 at 11:07 +0530, Nilesh Patra wrote: > - - Do you have any sensible way to cope up with so many mails from > different mailing lists and not potentially miss out on something > important? I don't know that what I do is sensible, but am moving towards a model where I subscribe to each mail source (list, account, alias, cron etc) using a different address and each is delivered to a different folder. To avoid being CCed on replies to alias/list mail, I try to remember to set Reply-To to encourage replies to not go to my inbox, however even when I do set Reply-To that doesn't always work, probably I need to also set Mail-Followup-To as well, but that isn't easy in my MUA yet. I read all the mail I recieve each day, often lots of it can be skimmed or just marked as read without reading it though. By having separate folders I can easily prioritise particular lists as needed. Scanning new thread subjects quickly helps that too. Then I use notmuch to index and search all the mails. -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: How do you manage debian mails on your mailbox?
Hello, On Sun 28 Aug 2022 at 09:53AM -07, Russ Allbery wrote: > > I have a group that's designed to catch mail from mailing lists that I > subscribed to but didn't add a split rule for, and I go through and > add split rules for those messages, or things that show up in my > personal inbox that I don't want there, from time to time. For > example, right now I have about five messages from order notifications > for takeout from local restaurants that are sitting in my inbox > waiting for me to have five minutes to write split rules so that they > sort into mail.food instead. A big advantage of having such a group is that then you can feel very free to subscribe to random mailing lists just to make a post, and you know all the new mail isn't going to flood your real inbox views/groups. I achieve this by programmatically constructing a notmuch query of "not A or not B or not C ..." where A, B and C are my existing mailing list inboxes. -- Sean Whitton signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: How do you manage debian mails on your mailbox?
Hello, On Sun 28 Aug 2022 at 11:07AM +0530, Nilesh Patra wrote: > > Hi, > > I have used my primary email address with folder hooks to sort out mails > according to mailing lists/subjects, using folder hooks and read those folders > every once in a while (depending on how involved I am with each ML/team) > However, despite that I am seeing quite a bit of debian stuff in > my inbox (sometimes there is an insane amount of noise there) > and it distracts me when I want to be doing something else, and end up reading > thread after thread which I _should_ save for later. > (Yeah, maybe you can blame me for it :)) > > So, two questions:- > - - Do you use your primary email address for debian stuff as well, > or is it a different one? > - - Do you have any sensible way to cope up with so many mails from > different mailing lists and not potentially miss out on something important? Complicated custom notmuch searches generated by a pile of Emacs Lisp. If everything is a virtual folder, it's easy to tweak them so that the Debian stuff stays where it's meant to. -- Sean Whitton signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: How do you manage debian mails on your mailbox?
Hi Nilesh, Nilesh Patra writes: > - - Do you use your primary email address for debian stuff as well, > or is it a different one? I use a separate mail account for Debian, separated from my personal and from my work one. > - - Do you have any sensible way to cope up with so many mails from > different mailing lists and not potentially miss out on something important? My way is to use an nntp gateway (sn) and read the mail with a news reader (emacs gnus in my case). That makes it very easy to go through them quickly and to not miss one. Works nicely for me since I started with Debian ~10 years ago, with only very few small drawbacks. Cheers Ole
Re: How do you manage debian mails on your mailbox?
Hi, On 2022-08-28 07:37, Nilesh Patra wrote: > - - Do you use your primary email address for debian stuff as well, > or is it a different one? I mainly use two different addresses: one for personal communication, and one for development stuff. My @debian.org address goes towards the latter. (In addition, I have quite a few special-purpose addresses, e.g. for administrator stuff.) > - - Do you have any sensible way to cope up with so many mails from > different mailing lists and not potentially miss out on something > important? I use a sieve filter that just sorts stuff by mailing list. Perhaps I'm just used to it, but it doesn't take me long to catch up with lists, which I do every 1-7 days (depending how active I can be for Debian during any given time). I basically just quick-scan for interesting Subject lines, check for an interesting thread, and read if so. Everything else gets marked as read. It can also help to look at authors (both in good and bad ways). Best, Christian
Re: How do you manage debian mails on your mailbox?
Nilesh Patra writes:
> So, two questions:-
> - Do you use your primary email address for debian stuff as well,
> or is it a different one?
My work mail goes to a separate inbox and a whole separate email system
(which I have never bothered to set up protocol access to and just read
via webmail, since my job doesn't use email very heavily). Other than
that, all email I receive for anything in my life, including Debian, goes
into a single inbox.
> - Do you have any sensible way to cope up with so many mails from
> different mailing lists and not potentially miss out on something
> important?
I've been using Gnus inside Emacs as my mail reader since, good lord,
1994, and one of the things that it supports is what it calls "split
rules." Gnus started life as a Usenet newsreader (which is part of what I
love about it), and therefore thinks about the world in terms of
newsgroups. This is very similar to but not entirely equivalent to the
typical email folder concept, and one of the ways in which it's different
is that Gnus (when using the nnml backend rather than something like IMAP)
does a preprocessing step on incoming email and sorts it into the
appropriate group first. This is basically equivalent to filter rules in
a typical email client except they're strongly emphasized in Gnus and (at
least in my opinion) the tools for managing them are superior. It's very
similar to the way procmail works, but uses elisp as the configuration
syntax.
So I have a set of split rules that sort mail out into various folders
that, because I'm an old Usenet person, are named sort of like newsgroups,
some before spam filtering (I'm still using bogofilter, which still mostly
works) and some after spam filtering. So, for example, I'm responding to
this message in what appears in my email client to be a "group" named
lists.debian.project. Your message was sorted into that group by the
following line in my split rule configuration:
("list-id" "debian-project\\.lists\\.debian" "lists.debian.project")
If someone were to send me direct email to my regular email address, that
would show up in a group called mail.personal. But if they send direct
mail to my Debian address, that shows up in a group called project.debian
due to the following split rule:
(to "rra@\\([a-z0-9-]*\\.\\)?debian\\.org" "project.debian")
However, before that rule are a few other rules that take precedence and
sort a few specific types of mail into different folders because I handle
them differently:
("x-loop" "owner@bugs\\.debian\\.org" "project.debian.bugs")
("x-mailer" "reportbug" "project.debian.bugs")
("from" "nore...@release.debian.org" "project.debian.packages")
("x-debian" "dak" "project.debian.packages")
("x-pts-package" ".*" "project.debian.packages")
("x-testing-watch-package" ".*" "project.debian.packages")
This allows me to maintain mental context when reading each "group,"
choose not to read things that are lower priority until later, and see
more important mail first because I split it out into higher-urgency
groups.
I have about 500 lines of split rules, but that's accumulated over nearly
30 years of using this way of reading email. I update them regularly and
I'm in the middle of changing my mind about how granular I want the split
rules to be and consolidating more things into a smaller number of groups,
but they don't require much work to maintain. I have a group that's
designed to catch mail from mailing lists that I subscribed to but didn't
add a split rule for, and I go through and add split rules for those
messages, or things that show up in my personal inbox that I don't want
there, from time to time. For example, right now I have about five
messages from order notifications for takeout from local restaurants that
are sitting in my inbox waiting for me to have five minutes to write split
rules so that they sort into mail.food instead.
--
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)
Re: How do you manage debian mails on your mailbox?
Nilesh Patra wrote on 28/08/2022 at 07:37:07+0200: > Hi, > > I have used my primary email address with folder hooks to sort out mails > according to mailing lists/subjects, using folder hooks and read those folders > every once in a while (depending on how involved I am with each ML/team) > However, despite that I am seeing quite a bit of debian stuff in > my inbox (sometimes there is an insane amount of noise there) > and it distracts me when I want to be doing something else, and end up reading > thread after thread which I _should_ save for later. > (Yeah, maybe you can blame me for it :)) > > So, two questions:- > - - Do you use your primary email address for debian stuff as well, > or is it a different one? Yes, I use p...@pimeys.fr which is my main public mail since 2014. > - - Do you have any sensible way to cope up with so many mails from > different mailing lists and not potentially miss out on something important? My previous setup, relying on mutt, and aggressive procmail filtering, was working nice, my inbox only had mails for my Debian address that really needed to land there. The issue I had was that relevant mail also went into some directories I regularly forgot to read and sometimes I found myself lagging because of that rather than because I'm lazy. I wanted to move to mutt + notmuch, but I did not really like it. So I tried emacs + notmuch but I was also unhappy. Then I remembered my PhD Director was using emacs + mu + mu4e. mu and notmuch are quite comparable (they're very efficient very fast mail indexers/searching tools), and mu4e was more of what I expected for a frontend in emacs. So, this is my setup, now, and it takes no time for mu to lookup in its index of my 316k mails and to grab me the ones that match best my query, and then it takes little time to mu4e to grab the threads around these mails and give them to me. The setup is a bit tedious the first time, though : you need to do either offlineimap or mbsync/isync to grab all mails locally, then you need to configure mu/notmuch to index those mails (indexing several thousands mails takes a bit of time), and then you can start to browse. (and you need to learn how to use these softs, too) Some pros: 1. You have a full copy of your mails locally. 2. It's still IMAP so there's synchronization of states. 3. It's *really* fast to search and retrieve 4. It can cope with truckloads of mails Some cons: 1. The MUA is constrained (notmuch is working with few MUAs, mu, I aready know of mu4e for emacs) 2. New softs to learn to use, a toolchain a bit more complex 3. Local storage is impacted (twice, for the raw mails, and for the index database) 4. With mu (IDK for notmuch), updates come sometimes with non-backward compatible xapian DB update, and one needs to reindex (I had to do it twice in a year or so). Cheers, -- PEB signature.asc Description: PGP signature
